Taken together, Gray’s works form a most interesting commentary on the varied life of the eighteenth century.  He was a scholar, familiar with all the intellectual interests of his age, and his work has much of the precision and polish of the classical school; but he shares also the reawakened interest in nature, in common man, and in mediaeval culture, and his work is generally romantic both in style and in spirit.  The same conflict between the classic and romantic schools, and the triumph of Romanticism, is shown clearly in the most versatile of Gray’s contemporaries, Oliver Goldsmith.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774)

Because The Deserted Village is one of the most familiar poems in our language, Goldsmith is generally given a high place among the poets of the romantic dawn.  But the Village, when we read it carefully, turns out to be a rimed essay in the style of Pope’s famous Essay on Man; it owes its popularity to the sympathetic memories which it awakens, rather than to its poetic excellence.  It is as a prose writer that Goldsmith excels.  He is an essayist, with Addison’s fine polish but with more sympathy for human life; he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in The Vicar of Wakefield, one of the most enduring characters in English fiction.  In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith was too much influenced by his friend Johnson and the classicists; but in his matter, in his sympathy for nature and human life, he belongs unmistakably to the new romantic school.  Altogether he is the most versatile, the most charming, the most inconsistent, and the most lovable genius of all the literary men who made famous the age of Johnson.

LIFE.  Goldsmith’s career is that of an irresponsible, unbalanced genius, which would make one despair if the man himself did not remain so lovable in all his inconsistencies.  He was born in the village of Pallas, Ireland, the son of a poor Irish curate whose noble character is portrayed in Dr. Primrose, of The Vicar of Wakefield, and in the country parson of The Deserted Village.  After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where he was regarded as hopelessly stupid, Goldsmith entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar, i.e. a student who pays with labor for his tuition.  By his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities, but that troubled him little.  He was also wretchedly poor, which troubled him less; for when he earned a few shillings by writing ballads for street singers, his money went oftener to idle beggars than to the paying of his honest debts.  After three years of university life he ran away, in dime-novel fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back in disgrace.  Then he worked a little, and obtained his degree in 1749.